Association of Alzheimer's Disease with the Risk of Developing Epilepsy: a 10-Year Nationwide Cohort Study

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Previous studies have reported conflicting results about the prevalence of seizures in Alzheimer's disease (AD). There are few epidemiological studies on this topic in Asia. Thus, the objective of this study was to examine demographic and clinical characteristics as well as incidence for seizures in AD patients compared to non-AD patients in a prospective, longitudinal, community-based cohort with a long follow-up. METHODS: Data were collected from National Health Insurance Service-National Elderly Cohort (NHIS-elderly) Database to define patients with AD from 2004–2006 using Korean Classification Diseases codes G30 and F00. We performed a 1:5 case-control propensity score matching based on age, sex, and household income. We conducted Cox proportional hazards regression analysis to estimate the risk of epilepsy in AD patients. RESULTS: In the cohort study, patients with AD had higher risk for epilepsy than those without AD, with hazard ratio of 2.773 (95% confidence interval [CI], 2.515–3.057). This study also showed that male gender and comorbidities such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease increased the risk of developing epilepsy. Patients with AD had 1.527 (95% CI, 1.375–1.695) times higher mortality rate than those in the control group. CONCLUSIONS: AD patients have significantly higher risk of developing epilepsy than non-AD patients.